G8 English / Listening

Listen to the same short piece many times.

Repetition of one recording teaches you more than a constant supply of new ones.

The instinct is to keep finding new material, because new feels like progress. But new material asks the same thing of you every time: understand roughly, follow the gist, move on. Rough understanding is exactly the level you are trying to move past. Meanwhile the sounds that defeated you go on defeating you, because you never stop long enough to look at them.

Try the other approach. Take two minutes of speech you like and stay with it. First pass, get the general sense. Second pass, write down everything you can catch. Third pass, look at the words and find the places where your ear invented something that was not there. Then listen again, and hear it correctly. Those corrected spots are permanent. You will recognise the same joins in other people's speech within days.

Two minutes is enough, and short is the point, because you will actually finish it. This method feels slower and produces faster results, which is a common shape in adult learning. Little material, many passes, full attention. Then move on to another two minutes and do it again.